[At this point in the stenogram there is a note "[reads]". The editorial office does not have the corresponding document. — Ed.]

...years, then they are setting a trap for us again. They are trying to lure our opponents into a place where he will certainly be defeated.

At first they called us utopians, and then they propose that we jump headfirst from the fifth floor. We know that we have much small-scale enterprise. Small proprietors — these are our opponents. The petty-bourgeois element — this is our most dangerous enemy. Commission agents and tenant farmers are a lesser enemy. Bureaucracy is also our enemy, and bureaucratic distortions.

Concerning the point that comrade Lozovsky spoke about, I shall say the following: listen to it carefully. Here it says: "Trade unions have no right to demand the application to such workers of Russian tariff rates, nor likewise of Russian rules concerning hiring." Here it is speaking of the Russian union, but I am being told about an international one. If capitalists see Russian conditions, then they say that these are communist conditions, absurd ones, and that Russian trade unions have no right to demand Russian conditions of hiring, in which something "supernatural" is included, but they have full right to apply international trade union agreements. And that is sufficient. Here nowhere is it said that strikes are forbidden. Here one must know how not to say everything prematurely.

As for the improvement of the position of the Russian worker, here comrades Marshev and Tartakovskii attacked and said that you will not manage the workers and will not force them to work, because if you provide for 1/5, then 4/5 will not want to work under worse conditions. Are we really dealing with workers so absurd, uncultured, and undisciplined? If so, then of course we must fall into panic and end our lives by suicide. If one hundred workers are going hungry and we tell them that twenty we can feed, but no more, will they refuse on that account? However, we have not encountered this so far. We somehow fed workers in certain branches of industry, but not all, and yet workers from those enterprises did not all flee, while from the remaining enterprises — all did. Is the Russian worker so corrupted by the mistakes of Soviet power that he will not be able to calculate that it is better to feed at least twenty than to force the entire hundred to starve? Here there is much of such a kind about which one should not speak prematurely. Why is it not possible to arrange things so that workers would work for the capitalists in rotation? Workers would work six months, receive work clothes, and then...